Dear old solipsistic Rufus is a long way from home. Photograph: Yui Mok
Something curious happens to your critical faculties at a muddy Glastonbury. The sheer effort involved in seeing anything begins to take its toll on the way you appreciate music. If you have to scrabble up a muddy slope in order to watch a band, the band at the top of said muddy slope had better provide something you can identify with, something you can sing along to. You're not in the mood to be lectured to, or educated, or treated to unreleased material and obscure b-sides. The most epicurean music fan thus finds themselves reduced to the level of the two-CDs-a-year-from-Tesco buyer.
Certain things never work: icy hauteur, attempts at conjuring up an atmosphere of glittery sophistication, jokes at the expense of an audience largely comprised of people who will be sleeping in puddles of filth. Certain things always work, most notably marijuana-addled good humour. So, over on the Other Stage, the Super Furry Animals seem somehow better than Rufus Wainwright. The former's arrival onstage is heralded by what may be the ultimate Glastonbury welcome - one male audience member becomes so excited that he exposes himself to appreciative cheers from the crowd surrounding him - while their addled banter ("this is a new song... it's going to be followed by, um, another song") causes mass hilarity.
The latter, although clearly a strikingly gifted songwriter on record, seems a very long way from home and out of his element up there on the Other Stage, surrounded by a lake of mud. The faint whiff of self-absorption and solipsism about his lyrics becomes overpowering: you think you've got problems because of your complicated and overtly competitive relationship with your father, mate? Well, I'm completely covered in shit, I've probably caught E coli and I'm here for another two days. That's a problem.
